I assume that, as an exercise, getting 5 simultaneous introductions working makes for a better paper; but is there a reason why you would want that in practice? Especially if there is any wobble in the ratios either randomly, across generations, or in the presence of certain environmental conditions that tweak the plant's metabolism one way or another that sounds like it would be a real pain in the ass to have to re-balance (and, if different patients are deemed to need different combinations even a perfectly stable plant is going to need re-balancing of the outputs) vs. very specifically going for a specific target output per-plant(or e. coli or yeast or whatever is easiest to bioreactor) and then just mixing to taste after purification. Is there some advantage I'm not seeing?

I realize that there are cases where some plant-sourced pharmacological effect looks like it is actually driven not by the identified 'active ingredient'; but by dozens or hundreds of assorted things, and in that case you just have to live with the complexity if you get better results with that than with purified isolates; but if you are deliberately engineering for very specific outputs why a mix of 5?

Aside from it just being a scientific research project, in practice even if they were produced in combination it's almost certain that they would be refined and purified for medicinal use.

But it would be much easier to not have to separate them and do one molecule per plant/field.

That aside your monoamine oxidase would prevent all but the psylocin from being orally active. Maaybe if the tobacco were very carefully dried and not fermented you could smoke it.

Now if they were to engineer in some harmaline/telepathine and put it into a tomato you could make some very special marinara sauce. The acids would act like a 'lemon-tec' and heating could perhaps be doing some decarboxalating. I have no idea if people experiment with mushrooms and ayahuasca simultaneously.

I can't wait for the Epstein Class to start raiding pasta shops to protect their black markets. :/

In New Hampshire people have, in RADAR cases, been able to subpoena the operators, the calibrators, the calibration certificates, and the source code, on these bases.

The judge allows it, the prosecution drops the case.

One strategy is to demand a trial on every small fine to tilt the economics in favor of liberty.

Follow the money.

This stinks of sabotage inflicted by unethically motivated actors.

Presuming they're not just incredible fools, which we ought not assume.

Nah, AWS provides logistics to military and intelligence and has for quite a while.

It's tough to argue, "these aren't military targets, we just rent the equipment and provide services to the military for hundreds of billions of dollars."

Which is probably what people will argue.

To what are you alluding?

Do they only have to state a reason or does somebody have to adjudicate whether that reason is validly "justified"? We have a Public Utilities Commission here that pretends to do such things.

Or is this one of these, "you can't know, so try it and a judge will tell you what the law was" sort of things?

Maybe somebody who understands Italian jurisprudence can clarify their theory of law.

Agreed.

Also Major Tom shouldn't try to fix anything on a spacecraft if it's somebody else's job.

I don't want to say I heard Mission Control on NASA TV reading down a procedure to tell an ISS commander how to tie his shoes but it felt like that.

Velcro, I guess.

Most helpful comment of the week.

Much kudos.

Yes, and they didn't notice that the lab tests were all done with plastic gloves.

I don't know, I went back to CPAN after I came to understand the socioeconomic and cultural ramifications of mandatory white space.

Papers, please?

"They yearn for the greenscreens."

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

We do have pretty good data from tree rings. Unless you think the trees came from somewhere else?

Even worse is when they compromise the VPN operators and then monitor your usage until you do something that makes them decide to crack down on you.

People erroneously think of VPNs as privacy protectors. They aren't, not unless you have very good reason to trust whoever is running the server. If you don't, then they're concentrators for likely subversive traffic and its origins.

The solution to this is to join a party and get involved in the decisionmaking. It's a lot easier than you might think, and you can have a lot more influence that you might expect, precisely because not that many people do this.